After the talk, I bought a couple of reprints of 17th century maps from him and I happened to notice there were two sizeable village settlements that are marked by pictograms to be to the south west of Ely but neither of them appear on modern road maps. The villages are labelled Bedwell Hey (or Bedelhey, or Bedelhuy, and there are probably other variations on that spelling) and Brame. Spelling used to be a case of "spell it how it sounds" and local accents of the person speaking and the person writing it down could lead to some interesting variety, so "Braham" for "Brame" was near enough for me for the second lost village!

Now, I've an enquiring mind, I'm quite nosey you might say, so I thought I'd try to see whether traces of either of the two lost villages still exist.

Preliminary Research.

My first step was to ask around as to whether anyone had any knowledge of the places, and this I did in the Ely On-line e-list. A couple of the readers kindly gave me my start by telling me that on the A10 Ely to Cambridge road there are still both a Bedwell Hey Farm and a Braham Farm.

Further information supplied to the e-list was that there is a Bedwell Hey Lane in Witchford - it's the lane that leads to, and past, Witchford Village Hall - and that it used to be a favourite, and quite well used, cut-through to the A10 Cambridge-Ely Road just north of Little Thetford.

Armed with this preliminary information that some clues do still exist on the ground, the first village I chose to look for was Bedwell Hey as it seemed to be the easier option. No sense in knocking myself out...

I contacted Ely Museum on what they had there, but was told that all their material on Bedwell Hey and/or Brame has been passed to Cambridgeshire County Records Office (see the end of this article for their, and other, contact details).

I obviously needed a map for my walk, so I took a trip into Burrows'

Bookshop in Ely and purchased the Ordnance Survey Explorer Map 226 (Ely & Newmarket, Mildenhall & Soham). It has an orange overwrap cover in its latest edition. It's scale is 1:25,000 which is approximately 4cm to 1Km, or 2.5 inches to the mile for those who have not yet gone metric. The map cost me £6.99 but it really is a must for anyone interested in the "what's where and what used to be where?" of this area.

The Walk.

Being a lazy so-and-so, I drove from my home in Sutton to Witchford Village Hall's car park on the morning of 6th June and, at 11am prompt, I set off on foot down Bedwell Hey Lane, first passing the fairly new Ely Park housing estate and, a little further on, Ely and District Racing Pigeon Club's premises. I didn't know Ely and District had a Racing Pigeon Club!

The first part of Bedwell Hey lane is well paved, yet plenty of rabbits were hopping about and the hedgerows were full of chirruping birds. The very grand Spinney Lodge is passed on the left and then the Lane does an abrupt right turn.

This is because the area was formerly cleared in World War II to be part of Witchford Aerodrome (most of which is now the Lancaster Way Industrial Estate) and Bedwell Hey Lane was diverted to skirt its perimeter. It is still well surfaced and very easy to walk on.

In fact, all the route turned out to have an easy surface to walk on.

The course of the Lane is quite obvious, though having a map helps, and once one is a little away from human habitation it was a real treat to hear a lark's song as it rose higher and higher in the clear July sky. There is one very surreal moment here along the diverted part of the route - a huge articulated truck trailer with Mega-Fisch Aquatic Supplies emblazoned on the side is parked in a lay-by of the path. There are no signs of how long it's been there, or why, and I found myself wondering what state its cargo might be in now. Never mind, press on.

Just before Bedwell Hey Lane resumes it's former straight course past the Aerodrome diversion there is a track off to the right that is marked on the map as Little Lane. It seems to go to nowhere in particular - it terminates at the Grunty Fen Catchwater drain and Grunty Fen Road - but it may be a continuation (or the end) of St John's Road which emerges out of the east side of Ely near Westfield Farm.

One of the things I picked up when researching the former courses of old railways, Roman roads and ley lines many years ago is that one can often detect former "through routes" from the fragments of them that remain and still show up on maps. Another tip is that where there is a hedge there is or was a "de facto" boundary of some sort. It may have been just a field or a pond, or even a whole farm or other property or a settlement comprising several buildings. Whatever it was, to go around the area one needed a path so if you're lost for a path look for a hedge!

Anyway, once past the Mega Fisch trailer, the Lane runs parallel to the former Witchford Aerodrome's main runway for a few yards and it was here that I suddenly paused, thinking I could hear a twin-engined aircraft somewhere quite near. Surely it could not be a Lancaster?

No such luck! It was the last surviving Dragon Rapide twin-engined biplane that still gives tours over this area, and it was passing overhead towards Ely from the direction of Duxford. Perhaps it was rather a drop in status for it after a long career as the then-apparent last word in comfortable transcontinental air travel, but it was a remarkable sight for me just there, just then, nevertheless.

Explorers should beware of the next bit as it's quite easy to take a wrong turn. You need to branch right past the small wood, not carry straight on. The wrong turn leads on towards Brame, as it happens.

As a point of historic interest, just past the junction of the paths, a road (now not visible on the ground) ran down from the Aerodrome perimeter road, past Eccleston and Pruden, to the old Stretham railway station, from where armaments and other supplies were brought into the Aerodrome when it was active. Only part of it still shows on the map, but you can see where it went if you start at Stretham station and follow the road straight up, finishing with a slight bend to the east once over the Grunty Fen Catchwater drain.

Bedwell Hey, Found At Last.

Carry straight on down the easy slope and at last Bedwell Hey Farm is found on the right of the Lane. It was here that I paused to check that I was passing by it on the correct side (it should stay on your right) and, by happy chance, a worker on the farm wandered over and asked me if I was lost. I wasn't, having just checked the map, but I told him why I was walking the Lane and he filled in many of the gaps in my knowledge about Bedwell Hey.

In fact, he told me, the last remnants of the village of Bedwell Hey lay under what is now Ely Fields Farm to the north of the path where we stood. When the Aerodrome was being levelled and then built up with the liberal addition of hundreds of tons of brick hardcore that had been reclaimed from the bomb-ravaged East End of London a lot of Saxon and

Roman finds were made, indicating that it was once quite a significant settlement. Why it declined until the decision to flatten what was left was so easy I cannot yet say.

It may be significant that Bedelhey/Bedelhuy is pictured as being as large as Witcham and Little Thetford on the 1646 and 1648 maps but it dwindled and disappeared at some time after that. What knocked it out? Plague? An exceptionally high flood? Some other natural cataclysm? Or simply that people moved away to other villages nearby in search of better-paid work? That's still a subject for further research on some other day.

The End Of The Walk.

Anyway, I resumed my walk down the steady grassy slope of Bedwell Hey Lane, past the home of the previous owner of Bedwell Hey Farm on the right (it's very well endowed with gnomes and perky robins, I noticed) and on down to the Lane's end at Redroofs on the A10.

"Redroofs? Hmm, now how long has that been there," I wondered. Uh oh, here we go again.

If you want to find the southern end of Bedwell Hey Lane it is just to the south of a post-mounted red letter box which serves some houses there at Redroofs on the A10 Cambridge-Ely Road.

Back To The Start.

The whole easy stroll to this point had taken just one hour and I faced two alternatives for the return. I could either retrace my steps back up Bedwell Hey Lane or do what I chose to do - walk up the A10, round the southern Ely by-pass to Witchford Road, and thence back into Witchford to collect my car from the Village Hall Car Park. This part of the walk took an hour and a quarter and is a bit harder going underfoot than the outward leg!

The traffic is unbelievably smelly when you are walking alongside it, and you'll be amazed what you see people have discarded from their cars. For example, there is someone with a very serious Coke (that's Coca-Cola) habit who drives round Ely's southern by-pass - I counted seventeen cans on one side alone between the A10 roundabout and the Little Chef roundabout on the A142.

It is as well to know that he south side of the A142 back to Witchford from Ely is horribly muddy when wet, and the wind whips across there like a sabre. If you are going to walk it after rain don't bother wearing anything you value. That said, the views southwards over the slight valley and the fens are breathtaking when you are not driving and can stop to take them in properly.

Sources of Further Information on Bedwell Hey and Brame:

If you are there when it's open, there is a fine little Museum devoted to Witchford Aerodrome at the bottom of the Lancaster Way Industrial Estate. Go to the gatehouse and the attendant will let you in and show you where it is.

Cambridge County Record Office, Shire Hall, Castle Hill, CAMBRIDGE, CB3 0AP
Telephone:- 01223 717281
Fax:- 01223 717201
Website: http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/CAM/RecordOffice.html
Email: County.Records.Cambridge@cambridgeshire.gov.uk

The Cambridgeshire Collection, Central Library Cambridgeshire, Lion Yard, Cambridge.
Telephone:- 01223 717281
Website: http://www.camcnty.gov.uk/library/cambcoll.htm

East Anglian Film Archive, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk, NR4 7TJ
Telephone: 01603 592664
Fax: 01603 458553
Website: http://www.uea.ac.uk/eafa/
Email: eafa@uea.ac.uk.